Wolfenstein 3D (DOS)

This page is for the DOS game, for other platforms see Wolfenstein 3D.

Wolfenstein 3D ran with the successful Nazi killing theme of Castle Wolfenstein (A2) and added the key element of 3D making it be hailed by many as the first popular FPS. You are B. J. Blazkowicz, a Nazi P.O.W. who must escape from the dreaded Castle Wolfenstein. You start the game with only the German Walther you stole from your guard, and the knife that you used to kill him. Along the way you'll also pick up a machinegun and the powerful chaingun. As you make you way up through the several levels of the castle you'll encounter many guards, SS soldiers, officers, guard dogs, and the occasional hulking boss. You can pick up food and first aid kits for health, and treasure to increase your score to get free lives. There are six episodes, each with 10 missions. You'll end up fighting robotic Adolf Hitler, some rocket launcher wielding bosses, and a crazed doctor with an undead mutant army at his command. It's kill or be killed down in this hell.

Screenshots

Music

VGMPF Album Art

According to the composer, the music was originally written using higher fidelity synthesizers than what you hear in the game. Because AdLib was the standard PC hardware at the time, the music had to be downgraded to play on it, so, the original sound Bobby Prince intended never made it to the game. Even still, the music is on par for the early 1990s and it does a good job keeping the mood in the game. The tracks include some epic sounding marches with military elements and plenty of eerie atmosphere. The music for the game was composed in Voyetra Sequencer Gold.

Game Rip

The IMF music files were ripped from the AudioHed.WL6 and AudioT.WL6 files using DarkOne's Wolfenstein music ripper. They were given the extension WLF instead of IMF in order to be played back at the proper speed. They were recorded using AdPlug 1.6 in Winamp.

The order of the music files is based on their order of play in the game. This differs from the order they appear in the game files. The titles come from multiple sources. The music titles come from various sources including, Bobby Prince's released MIDIs, extrapolated meta tags, or popular online names. The game doesn't use MIDI, but original music files were obtained from Bobby Prince's web site.

If the music is opened with ChaosEdit, the files can be played back properly on a Windows XP+ machine.

Audio Devices

It shold be noted that Wolfenstein 3D has a hidden option to choose PC Speaker not only for synthesed sounds, but also for digitized ones. Just open CONFIG.WL6 with any hex editor and set the value at offset 0x01D2 to 01.

When it's done, in-game settings will not show your choice for PCM sounds' device, most probably because idSoftware supposed that players would have a proper DAC for that option anyway, so they removed it from setup menu (for those who didn't, they released a patch that do the same job as abovementioned editor). Also, to save memory, or due to lack of necessary skills, programmer gave PC Speaker much fewer cycles comparing to other devices, so the quaity of sound is worse than it could be.